A Revaluation of Axel

A REVALUATION OF AXEL Vn.LIERS DE L1SLE-ADAM was said to have lived on terms of dangerous intimacy with the dream. His almost pathological fear of too-close association with his contemporaries made for an unhealthy state in his personal life. He lived apart from his fellow men in the manner of a recluse. The symptoms of this are everywhere evident in his last work, published posthumously in 1890, Axel. It is perhaps time for a reappraisal of that complicated drama which Edmund Wilson introduced to the American reader in his Axel's Castle (1931). Wilson's comments about the play were limited to certain belle-Iettristic remarks to give his thorough study of Symbolism a convenient fulcrum. In his final chapter he proceeded to contrast the Axel of Villiers de l1sle-Adam's play with the poet Rimbaud. Each was intended to represent an approach of the "Symbolist" man: Axel, the renunciation of life through suicide; Rimbaud, the rejection of art and the search for a new medium. Before Wilson's book, Axel had received little attention. The play was published by the Maison Quantin in Paris one year after its author's death. It was received ungratefully by a generation which was doubtless unprepared for it. Even the "abuses" multiplied by the Symbolist poets of the 1880's rarely went to the lengths suggested by Villiers' play. There were those who turned to Axel as a kind of liturgy of Symbolism, an almost sacred work, like W. B. Yeats and Mallarme. They found the possibility of performing it heretical; they forced it into the category of the closet drama. When it was finally put on at the Theatre de la Gaite lyrique, in Paris, it survived two performances (February 26 and 27, 1894). The reviews were consistently unfavorable. Both Lemaitre of Debats and Sarcey of the Temps, the most distinguished drama critics of the period, took violent exception to this "art nouveau" which Axel seemed to represent. It was agreed that the mere presence of dialogue did not make a literary work acceptable theater. The almost total absence of dramatic action, the over-sustained lyrical outpourings horrified drama critics who still believed that the "unities" carried conviction. (The problem will recur some years later when the first attempts were made to produce Paul Claudel. Only recently has the Comedie fran~aise admitted him to its repertoire by performing such plays as Le Soulier de satin, L'Annonce faite aMarie, and L'Otage.) It is difficult to know how Villiers himseH felt about his play. The presence of detailed, often excessively involved, stage directions would seem to indicate that he intended it eventually for the stage. One French critic (E. Drougard) writing about Axel remarked: "One can 236 1959 A REVALUATION OF Axel 237 state with conviction that it consumed the entire life of the author; he never stopped thinking about it, working on it; and finally only decided to publish it, so it seems, under the pressure of necessity. . . ." Axel then becomes Villiers' Faust. Thematically the two works beg comparison . Neither the second part of Goethe's work nor Axel is especially stageworthy, though each aspires to be dramatic. It is clear that Villiers had at least the Faust legend in mind when he wrote his own play. He probably knew Goethe's Faust in Nerval's translation which appeared in 1828; he perhaps also was familiar with Berlioz' Damnation of Faust which was popular with the Symbolists at the end of the 19th century. Axel, in an important sense, is the literary application of the formula for the synthesis of the arts set down in Wagner's treatise Opera and Drama. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam was another in the long succession of Symbolist writers who turned to the German composer for inspiration. He shared the opinion of his contemporaries who fashioned an ideal Wagner-making him over into a literary figure who had inadvertently wandered into music. Turning to Axel, one is struck by a series of "fin de siecle" effects which have been forced into a form casually resembling a play. It is divided into four sections each of which is referred to as...